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37 Android Patent Lawsuits
An anonymous reader writes "37 lawsuits have been filed against Android in a little more than a year, the latest one of them being Microsoft's lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec. ReadWriteWeb says 'the number of patent lawsuits related to the Android operating system is unprecedented' and shows an infographic that is also available on Twitpic and as a PDF file, on Scribd. The first two suits were filed in March 2010 by Apple and MobileMedia against HTC. The original source of the chart, the FOSS Patents blog, says that Android's market share is only one factor, other reasons being that Google's patent portfolio is 'far too weak for what's undertaken in connection with Android'; that Google doesn't do 'inbound licensing' from trolls; and that Google tends to ignore patent issues because Google itself is rarely sued: in most of these cases, Android device makers are under attack."
There are actually two issues here.
First, this is great news for Microsoft and Meego. When manufacturers will start to get really sued for all the patent issues Google ignores, they will look at other possibilities. HTC has always been both Android and Windows Phone 7 supporter, so they will drop Android and just make Windows Phone 7 devices. So will all the other manufacturers. Developers will also jump ship to Microsoft and WP7 when they see the development platform - it's free of all the malware, piracy and other shit that Android market and freeloader userbase is filled with. They will absolutely love to use Visual Studio and C# instead of that crap and slow programming language called Java. Developers matter and Microsoft takes care of them.
Secondly, this is also bad news WebM. It's clear, like the summary states, that Google doesn't care about patent issues and this shows it even more. This careless approach from Google is just going to make manufacturers, website owners and companies avoid WebM at all costs. This will lead them to take H.264, which is pretty much guaranteed not to have any legal issues. Google is destroying their other projects too, not only Android.